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Children of a lesser God
Mahdi Basheer Hasan al Badri is barely 30 years old and the product of three wars as well as a ...
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Think big, think systems
Institutions must learn how to produce outcomes on scale much faster. The climate is getting hotter faster than our collective ...
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Two sides to technology
This last edition of Tech Tales revisits the past 20 columns which described the myriad applications of technology, the exciting ...
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The outward bound
When news of business billionaire MukeshAmbani acquiring a massive 300-acre estate in England was flashed in the media, it was ...
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What did Afghan NGOs achieve?
I worked in Afghanistan from 2004 till 2016 on short assignments with the UN system and national and international CSOs ...
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The power of local
IMPACT has become an important concept in social entrepreneurship. When more financial resources are deployed to have more impact, the ...
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Eyes in the street
PEGASUS no longer has wings and is dead in the media. One refers not to the winged horse from Greek ...
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Bombay House and Delhi
WHEN the Narendra Modi government announced its decision to hand over Air India back to the House of Tatas, a ...
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Bad bill, good policy in UP
THE population issue has been a predominant political and electoral subject of speculation for decades. With one of the oldest ...
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The young and change
SOME students in Classes 11 and 12 in elite urban schools turned to me for counsel a few months ago. ...
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Why scientific temper matters
NEVER before has science touched the lives of more people than it has in the last few months. “Touched,” literally: ...
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Koizumi’s question
ON his first visit to India in 2005, Japan’s Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, asked his host, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, ...
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Towards holistic care
In the world of music today it would be considered weird, perhaps sacrilegious, for any group of professional musicians or ...
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Waking up in the mountains
THE Himalayas are the roof of the world and for centuries remained highly inaccessible. Today, with modern technology and climate ...
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Small tech, big benefits
TECHNOLOGY. The word conjures up near-magic, which creates gadgets and means for enriching and transforming our lives. Inevitably, it is ...
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Narasimha Rao’s legacy
THE birth centenary of former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao will be observed on June 28, 2021. The government of ...
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Jobs gone, time to spend
THE COVID-19 pandemic is testing our institutions and our society like no other crisis in recent memory. Thus far, the ...
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But where are the jobs?
EARLIER this month, the governor of Haryana gave his assent to a bill providing 75 percent reservation in the private ...
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Travel on the cusp of big change
COMMUNICATE, don’t commute, advised Arthur Clarke. This famous aphorism-cum-prediction of the well-known futurist and sci-fi writer, made many decades ago, ...
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Education is soft power
INDIAN students have been going to the US, in particular, for over seven decades to get higher education from some ...
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Cutting out corruption
WE live in a world where we have built the cost of corruption into our transactions. Whether it is getting ...
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NRIs can vote, but migrants?
THE election-conducting machinery in our country has made persistent efforts over the past 10 years to enable six million voters, ...
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Business in Songbola times
Business in Songbola times COVID with its lockdowns has resulted in many changes, challenges and opportunities. From the ...
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Diplomacy and public opinion
THE decision of the external affairs ministry to issue an official statement in response to tweets by American singer Rihanna ...
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Are Railways’ numbers real?
INDIAN Railways has started on a hugely ambitious journey, outlined in the draft national plan circulated among different ministries. As ...
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The three D’s of digitization
DEMATERIALIZATION is a staple in many a sci-fi film: an object or person is zapped by a beam-gun and, poof, ...
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Memoirs of a Lutyens leader
IT is perhaps typical of a quintessential Lutyens’ Delhi leader like Pranab Mukherjee that only the fourth volume of his ...
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The declining aura of the Election Commission
In 2011, when then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited India, she referred to the Election Commission of India ...
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New beginnings for NGOs
The unprecedented crisis surrounding the coronavirus pandemic has touched the lives of millions of people and organizations in different ways. ...
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Democracy and migrants
The tragedy of migrant workers following the nation-wide lockdown, imposed with four hours’ notice on March 24, is still fresh ...
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The highs and lows of tech
Over the past few months, gloom and doom prophecies have gained many followers — with good reason. A virus, COVID-19, ...
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The post-COVID world order
When COVID-19 becomes history the era of this virus will perhaps be remembered by two words — lockdown and webinar. One ...
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India’s global weakness is schooling
The CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, recently said that the “number one reason why we like to be in China ...
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Virus taught us a lesson
THE COVID-19 crisis has shown us that crises have no borders or boundaries. They can happen anytime, anywhere and to ...
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Lives or livelihoods?
When a society laments the loss of an economy more than the loss of human life, it doesn’t need a ...
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Your post-COVID life
DESPITE the many divergences on issues related to the pandemic, there is one on which there is a consensus: the ...
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COVID and the communists
HEALTH activists and concerned citizens have tried for a long time to place healthcare and public health on the national ...
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The virus unites us
A lot has changed in the past month. The COVID-19 crisis has thrown up challenges on the public health front ...
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COVID-19 and democracy
It is not easy to get down to writing when the country, indeed the world, faces an uncertain future due ...
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The new workplaces
A description of our present situation could well be “so near and yet so far”. Locked-in and in quasi-quarantine, we ...
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Strong leader, weak State
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore a paradox at the heart of the present political conjuncture in India. ...
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Learning by doing
Young Mara came rushing to me in a very disturbed frame of mind. He was then studying in Class 3 ...
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Are EVMs and VVPATs reliable?
Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) were first conceived by the Election Commission of India (ECI) as a replacement for the ballot ...
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Cut out the space tech drama
Mllions of Indians stayed awake all night on September 6-7, 2019, eyes glued to their TV sets. It was not, ...
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The citizenship paradox
I was amused to read a tweet from Indian external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar in which he quoted former Union ...
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Water on my plate
I have always found it attractive to look at individualized solutions to global problems. After all, it makes much more ...
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On foot in rural India
It was 12 years ago, in 2008, that I set out on a walk across rural Karnataka. Spread over 30 days, ...
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The end of anonymity
The rhetorical ‘don’t-you-know-who-I-am’ question, part of the armoury of the sons and daughters of Delhi VIPs when accosted for an infringement ...
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Are you a citizen?
Citizenship has been in the news for some time now and not necessarily for good reasons. The past month and a ...
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Masthi and the bees
There is so much talk today about the GDP and the economy not doing well across the political and business ...
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Who ‘represents’ us?
India is a representative democracy. We, the citizens, are expected and required to elect 543 members of the Lok Sabha ...
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Innovate to prosper
Innovate, patent, produce and prosper. This was Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s message to young scientists at the Indian Science Congress ...
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Language and opportunity
Of all the daily editorials I had to write during my tenure as the editorial page editor of the Times ...
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The value of team spirit
More than two decades ago, we petitioned the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) on behalf of the indigenous tribals living ...
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The status of NOTA
The phrase ‘criminalisation of politics’ entered the Indian lexicon in 1993 when it was used by the Vohra Committee which ...
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In the midst of a transition
Few, if any, would contest this assertion — “technology has radically altered how we live.” Yet, it is worth analysing ...
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New India and the West
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has expressed serious concern about the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) voted ...
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The silent bystander
Imbued with the desire to enhance citizen engagement and take it beyond mere voting, I launched a programme called ‘Making ...
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My name is Bond, Electoral Bond
The heading of my column is, obviously, an adaptation of a famous sentence written by Ian Fleming, creator of the ...
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In schools, basics still matter
Indians are known to value education. Traditionally, the learned — especially the teacher, the guru — have been much respected, ...
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Politics of consensus
In his authoritative treatise on the Indian Constitution, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation, Granville Austin made the interesting ...
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Let’s salvage our cities
Cities are meant to be centres of innovation and job creation. But in India we are staring at an urban ...
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Picking up the tab for elections
Who should pay for elections? This is a perennial question. The theoretical or philosophical perspective is straightforward. People contest elections ...
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Devices for a healthy India
May you live a hundred years is a traditional Indian blessing, underlying which is the thought of being healthy enough ...
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Politics of foreign trade policy
It is not surprising that the subject of India joining the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement figured in the ...
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Why is 'one election' a priority?
Question: Who is likely to be the most knowledgeable on what electoral reforms are needed? Options: (a) Those who have ...
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Bridging the trust deficit
We live in a world where we see such degradation of human values and corruption all around that we now ...
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Drones, AI for better farms
Agriculture is now a comparatively small and decreasing part of India’s economy, accounting for just about 15 percent of the ...
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China's shadow on South Asia
China’s dramatic and sustained economic rise over the past quarter-century has impacted the global economy and global geopolitics. In purchasing ...
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Recovering lost childhood
A few months ago, I was taken by a friend who works with an NGO to visit a special school ...
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The devil in data
Data is the new oil is a currently popular aphorism. To the extent that it connotes a resource of great ...
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Destroy the seeds of caste
My first visit to government schools was some time in 1998-99, even before the Azim Premji Foundation became operational. The ...
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A loyalty tax on nationalism
One of the amusing aspects of the debate on nationalism triggered by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) election campaign and ...
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A way out of poverty
I first met Shivakumara when I got to travel in the cab that he was driving. It was around midnight ...
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On a dangerous path
Back in 1998, I spotted boys and girls in their school uniforms, probably from Classes 8-9, frolicking with beer in ...
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The trust deficit
A few years ago, I was in Bengaluru to attend a meeting called by the government of Karnataka. On my ...
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Some genuine issues
The journey from Raipur to Dharamjaygarh block in Raigarh district of Chhattisgarh on a hot and dry April day seemed ...
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What's manifest in manifestos
A party political manifesto is supposed to impart distinct brand identity to a political party and its leadership so that ...
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A new path for tribal women
You do not usually expect the presence of 14 women dressed in all their finery at a busy shopping mall ...
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Secular practices for schools
A few days ago, someone circulated a message titled ‘Calendar of Indian Festivals in 2019’ on WhatsApp. Out of sheer ...
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Who will police the police?
Over the next several weeks the festival of democracy will keep Indians busy and entertained. The jingle on my radio ...
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Why Gandhi still inspires
The entire nation will be marking Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary throughout 2019. For many like me, born in independent ...
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Fixing some fundamentals
When I was a child, a cousin posed a riddle to me. He asked: “How many rotis can you eat ...
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Do ministers matter?
Time was when Hyderabad had become famous for being home to the largest council of ministers. More recently it has ...
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Why soft power counts
President Donald Trump recently made headlines, yet again. This time he criticised ‘friend and ally’ India on something that sounded ...
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An unsecular education
For about 18 years of my working life I lived in an upscale Mumbai neighbourhood and my children grew up ...
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Do manifestos matter?
A committee set up by the Central Election Commission of India has come out with a curious, if amusing, ruling. ...
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Kolkata’s dirty air
Last month Kolkata surpassed Delhi to become the metro city with the worst air quality in the country. This is ...
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Schools must teach social values
Last week I was in the historic city of Vijayapura (earlier Bijapur) after almost 15 years. The Azim Premji Foundation ...
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Poverty of the wealthy
In the mid-1980s, when I was teaching at the University of Hyderabad, I invited the then finance minister of West ...
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Desire and the rural woman
An eye-opening incident occurred in 2002 when we were visiting villages in Mehrauni block of Lalitpur district, Uttar Pradesh, to ...
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School official with no power
I was excited to visit this Model Senior Secondary Government School in one of the blocks in Rajasthan because a ...
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Who needs a library?
Driving down one of Beijing’s broad boulevards one evening, I chanced upon a tall building with dozens of students seated ...
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Still early days for women
Since the beginning of October, Indian print, TV and social media are full of stories of women speaking out about ...
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Chasing the English dream
On my way to Hyderabad airport, around 35-40 kilometres from Gulbarga, I spent time interacting with government school teachers at ...
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An Indian view of the world
The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) funds a think-tank studying China called the Institute of Chinese Studies (ICS). Its board ...
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Rising tide of mob lynching
First it was Muslims accused of killing cows, then it was Dalits accused of killing cows or having the temerity ...
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Urban governance is a failure
In 1992, the Constitution of India underwent two seminal amendments — the 73rd Amendment for rural areas and the 74th ...
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The story of toilets and schools
After landing at Jodhpur airport, I proceeded directly to the ‘Event with Teachers from 15 schools in the Cluster’ with ...
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